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Students in this class will read a weekly selection of Pulitzer Prize winning plays and be required to analyze and explore these plays beat by beat in class discussion and weekly critical writing exercises. This is an in-depth script interpretation class in which theme, dramatic structure, arc, character development, tone, style and extensive study of the given playwrights and their influences will be explored in detail and in a way that centers the questions one would need to interrogate in order to bring these diverse and extraordinary pieces of work to life.

The tragic protagonist is a person pushed to the breaking point- dealing with disaster, fate, suffering, unspeakable loss, and often the consequences of their own bad decisions. Greek tragedy shows human beings struggling in a world that often seems brutal, senseless, and beyond their control, where contingency is a hard fact of life. As such, tragedy raises significant philosophical questions: Does human life have purpose? How should we respond to trauma and suffering? How does one live an ethical life in a deeply flawed world?

Errol Morris is a filmmaker who is obsessed with his obsessions: his cinematic essays veer towards subjects who themselves are consumed by their own fanaticism. In this class, we will study several films and series that center on what others may simply refer to as “eccentrics,” subjects who, despite knowing that their obsessions may ultimately lead to devastation, continue nonetheless to pursue their fixations. Through viewing such works as Gates of Heaven, Tabloid, First Person, Vernon, Florida, Mr.

This course will track the development of the long poem and extended poetic sequence as a poetic form in 20th and 21st century poetry. While the long poem does not have a narrow, succinct definition and can refer to many types (and lengths) of writing from sonnet cycle to verse novel, long poems are often associated with the ambition to write an iconic, all-encompassing, be-all end-all lyric or iconic text, allowing a writer to be encyclopedic and maximalist in how they see the world, to communicate a world view or indulge in obsessive world-building.